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English level: B1–C1

The Hidden Planets in Your Week

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Words in this video

wanderern. someone who moves from place to place 1:24

The Greeks later called them planetai, which means wanderers.

lunaradj. connected with the Moon: a lunar month 1:59

Sabbathn. the seventh day, a day of rest 2:23

The Jewish calendar has counted it for well over two thousand years, ending each week with the Sabbath, a day of rest.

astrologern. someone who believes the planets shape our lives 3:22

Astrologers believed that each hour of the day was ruled by one of the seven planets, in that fixed order.

a happy accident of arithmeticphrase a lucky result of simple maths 4:21

The order of our week is a happy accident of arithmetic.

unbrokenadj. continuing without a stop 7:28

You are using a count that has passed, unbroken, through Babylon, Rome and Kyoto.

Grammar in this video (41)
  1. Imperative to give an example
  2. “too” at the end
  3. Present passive + “apart”
  4. Contrast: “And yet”
  5. Negative subject
  6. Subject question
  7. Relative clause + “yourself”
  8. “what is now …”
  9. Repetition: “night after night”
  10. Non-defining relative clause
  11. “That is where …”
  12. give + person + thing; reason to …
  13. Past passive
  14. “had to” = past of “must”
  15. “no matter what”
  16. Present perfect + “for”
  17. Participle clause (C1)
  18. Clause inside a relative clause (C1)
  19. Inversion after “Then” (C1)
  20. Phrasal verb “jump around”
  21. Passive with a phrasal verb
  22. “one of the + plural noun”
  23. “Say …” = “Suppose …”
  24. Maths English + “with X left over”
  25. “be named after”
  26. Imperative + and = “if”
  27. Compound adjective
  28. order + object + to-infinitive
  29. “swap A for B”
  30. wh-word + to-infinitive
  31. Short sentence without a verb
  32. Reporting to hedge
  33. “That's why” + “read”
  34. “By + time” + past perfect
  35. Negative adverb of frequency
  36. “the one” + preposition at the end
  37. Present perfect + extra adjective (C1)
  38. “every one of” + plural
  39. enjoy + -ing
  40. “since” = “because”
  41. Indirect question

Transcript

0:00 Intro

Take Friday.1

1. Imperative to give an example “Take X” means “Let's use X as an example.” It is a quick way to start an explanation.

In Spanish, it's viernes, the day of Venus.

In Hindi, it's Shukravaar.

That means the day of Venus, too.1

2. “too” at the end “too” at the end of a sentence means “also”. “That means …” explains what a word stands for.

In Japanese, it's kin-yobi.

Kin means gold, or metal.

And the planet Venus is called kinsei, the metal star.

These three languages are spoken thousands of kilometres apart, by people with very different histories.1

3. Present passive + “apart” be + past participle (are spoken) puts the language first, not the speakers. “X apart” gives the distance between things.

And yet, on the same day, they all point to the same planet.1

4. Contrast: “And yet” “And yet” = “but, surprisingly”. It is stronger than “but” and introduces something unexpected.

Nobody voted for this.1

5. Negative subject “Nobody” already makes the sentence negative, so the verb stays positive: not “Nobody didn't vote”.

No king ordered it for the whole world.

So who decided that a week has seven days?1

6. Subject question When “who” is the subject, there is no “did”: “Who decided …?”, not “Who did decide …?”.

And why do the days come in such a strange order?

The answer starts with seven lights in the night sky, and one small piece of maths that you can check yourself.1

7. Relative clause + “yourself” “that you can check” describes “maths”. “yourself” adds “without help from anyone”.

So keep one number in mind: twenty-four.

0:58 Seven Lights

More than three thousand years ago, people in Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, watched the night sky very closely.1

8. “what is now …” “what” = “the place that”. We use it for places whose names or borders have changed.

Most stars stayed in the same patterns, night after night.1

9. Repetition: “night after night” noun + after + noun means it happens again and again, without a break (day after day, year after year).

But seven lights moved across those patterns: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

The Greeks later called them planetai, which means wanderers.1

10. Non-defining relative clause After a comma, “which” adds extra information about the word before it. You cannot use “that” here.

That is where our word planet comes from.1

11. “That is where …” A natural way to point to an origin. The preposition “from” goes to the end of the sentence.

The Moon gave people a second reason to like the number seven.1

12. give + person + thing; reason to … “give somebody something” has two objects. “a reason to + verb” = a reason for doing it.

It changes shape in four main steps, and each step takes about seven days.

In Babylon, some days of the month were special: the seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth.

On those days, certain activities were avoided.1

13. Past passive were + past participle. We don't know or care who avoided them, so the activities are the subject.

But there was a problem.

A month of the Moon is about twenty-nine and a half days, not twenty-eight.

So this kind of week had to start again with every new moon.1

14. “had to” = past of “must” “must” has no past form, so we use “had to” for a past obligation or necessity.

The week we use today does something different.

It never starts again.

It simply keeps counting, seven, seven, seven, no matter what the Moon is doing.1

15. “no matter what” = “whatever”. The clause after it keeps normal word order: “what the Moon is doing”.

This nonstop week is very old.

The Jewish calendar has counted it for well over two thousand years, ending each week with the Sabbath, a day of rest.2

16. Present perfect + “for” It started in the past and is still true now. “well over” = “much more than”.

17. Participle clause (C1) “-ing” after a comma adds what happens at the same time: “and it ends each week with …”.

2:30 The Strange Order

Now for the strange part.

Ancient astronomers put the seven lights in order, from the one they believed was farthest from Earth to the nearest.1

18. Clause inside a relative clause (C1) “the one (that) they believed was farthest” = “the one that, they believed, was farthest”. Note: no “that” and no “it”.

Saturn, the slowest, was at the top.

Then came Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus and Mercury.1

19. Inversion after “Then” (C1) Adverb + verb + subject: “Then came X” instead of “Then X came”. It is common in lists and stories.

Last was the Moon, the fastest and the closest.

Now look at our week.

Saturday, Sunday, Monday.

Saturn, the Sun, the Moon.

That is not the same order.

It jumps around.1

20. Phrasal verb “jump around” verb + around = move in no clear order. Here: the planets are not in a simple line.

Why?

The answer was written down by a Roman historian, Cassius Dio, about eighteen hundred years ago.1

21. Passive with a phrasal verb write down → was written down. “by” names who did it.

And it uses the number from the beginning: twenty-four.

Astrologers believed that each hour of the day was ruled by one of the seven planets, in that fixed order.1

22. “one of the + plural noun” “one of the seven planets” takes a plural noun but means a single one.

Say the first hour of a day belongs to Saturn.1

23. “Say …” = “Suppose …” Informal imperative to set up an example: “Say X happens” = “Imagine that X happens”.

The second hour goes to Jupiter, the third to Mars, and so on, around and around.

A day has twenty-four hours.

Seven goes into twenty-four three times, with three left over.1

24. Maths English + “with X left over” “A goes into B n times” = B ÷ A. “with + noun + past participle” describes a result.

So by the end of the day, the list has moved three steps along.

That means the first hour of the next day belongs to the Sun.

And each day was named after the planet that ruled its first hour.1

25. “be named after” to get the name of someone or something. “that ruled its first hour” tells us which planet.

Saturn's day, then the Sun's day.

Do it again, and the next day starts with the Moon.1

26. Imperative + and = “if” “Do X, and Y happens” = “If you do X, Y happens.”

Then Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus.

Draw it on a circle, and the jumps make a seven-pointed star.1

27. Compound adjective number + noun + -ed, joined by a hyphen. The noun stays singular: seven-pointed, not seven-points.

Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

The order of our week is a happy accident of arithmetic.

4:26 One Week, Many Languages

This planetary week spread across the Roman Empire.

In the year three twenty-one, Emperor Constantine ordered courts and workshops to rest on the day of the Sun: Sunday.1

28. order + object + to-infinitive order / tell / ask somebody to do something.

When the week reached northern Europe, Germanic peoples swapped some of the Roman gods for their own.1

29. “swap A for B” give A and take B instead. “their own” = their own gods.

Mars became Tiw, a god of war: Tuesday.

Mercury became Woden: Wednesday.

Jupiter, the god of thunder, became Thor: Thursday.

And Venus became Frigg: Friday.

Saturday kept its Roman name, Saturn.

So English still hides all seven planets, if you know where to look.1

30. wh-word + to-infinitive “where to look” = “where you should look”. Also: how to do, what to say.

Spanish kept the Roman planets for the weekdays: lunes for the Moon, martes for Mars, miércoles for Mercury.

But the Church renamed the weekend: sábado, from Sabbath, and domingo, the Lord's day.

The same week also travelled east.

In India, the days carry Sanskrit names for the planets: Ravi for the Sun, Soma for the Moon, Mangala for Mars.

Same planets, same order.1

31. Short sentence without a verb For emphasis, spoken English often drops the verb: “(They are the) same planets, (in the) same order.”

Buddhist star books carried it on to China.

Japanese tradition says the monk Kukai brought it from China to Japan in the year eight hundred and six.1

32. Reporting to hedge “X says …” shows where a claim comes from, without saying it is certainly true.

In East Asia, the five planets were named after five elements: fire, water, wood, metal and earth.

That's why the Japanese week reads: sun, moon, fire, water, wood, metal, earth.1

33. “That's why” + “read” “That's why” = “For this reason”. “read” here means “is written as”.

And here is the amazing part.

A Japanese court diary from the year ten-oh-four writes down the day of the week.

Count forward from that day to today, and it still matches.

6:24 Can We Change It?

Some governments tried to break the seven-day week.

After the French Revolution, France switched to a ten-day week, with one day of rest in ten.

By eighteen-oh-six, France had gone back to the old calendar.1

34. “By + time” + past perfect had + past participle shows it was already finished before that point in the past.

In nineteen twenty-nine, the Soviet Union tried a five-day week, and later a six-day week.

Family members often had different days off and rarely rested together.1

35. Negative adverb of frequency “rarely” = “almost never”. It goes before the main verb.

In nineteen-forty, the seven-day week came back.

So why does the week survive?

Days come from the Earth's spin.

Months come from the Moon.

Years come from the Sun.

But the week does not fit anything in the sky.

It survives because people keep it together: in religion, in work, in markets and in habit.

The week is the one unit of time that nature never asked for.1

36. “the one” + preposition at the end “the one” = “the only”. The preposition of “ask for” stays at the end of the clause.

So the next time you check what day it is, remember this.

You are using a count that has passed, unbroken, through Babylon, Rome and Kyoto.1

37. Present perfect + extra adjective (C1) “unbroken” between commas describes how it passed: without any break.

And every one of its twenty-four hours once had a planet.1

38. “every one of” + plural “every one of the hours” takes a plural noun but a singular verb: in the present it would be “every one of them has …”.

If you enjoyed learning English this way, subscribe.1

39. enjoy + -ing After “enjoy” we use -ing, not to-infinitive: enjoy learning, not enjoy to learn.

We explain big ideas in clear English, with subtitles in several languages.

And since you're still watching, here is a small task.1

40. “since” = “because” Here “since” gives a reason, not a starting time.

Find out which planet gives today its name in your language.1

41. Indirect question Inside a sentence, the question keeps normal word order: “which planet gives …”, not “which planet does give …”.

Then tell us in the comments.

Sources